HealthNet: SATELLIFE's Global Communications Network

HealthNet is SATELLIFE's computer-based telecommunications system that links health care professionals around the world and to each other. (Africa | Asia | Central America | South America)

SATELLIFE focuses its attention on developing countries, where telecommunication systems are often unreliable or nonexistent, and where cost or distance limits access to medical literature and other health information. For people living in those areas where such conditions exist, HealthNet provides access to the latest health information, e-mail connectivity, electronic conferencing, and other services tailored to meet current demands.

HealthNet technologies include a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite, simple ground stations, and telephone-based computer networks. This seamless system functions reliably and inexpensively even in areas with little or no telecommunications infrastructure. Individual users are linked to the network via HealthNet "nodes" in each country where HealthNet operates. These nodes are electronic distribution centers - computers that relay messages and other data to and from each point in the network, much as a local post office collects and distributes mail.

HealthNet is also a system of people. HealthNet communication and information services are used by approximately 19,500 health care workers in more than 150 countries worldwide. The international health community has used HealthNet in a variety of ways:

• Physician Collaborations Burn surgeons in Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda have used HealthNet to consult with one another on patient treatment and reconstrucctive surgery techniques.
• Data Collection In The Gambia, health workers who once had to travel 700 kilometers per week to collect data for a clinical trial employed HealthNet to send this information via electronic mail.
• Health Care Delivery Physicians in Ethiopia use HealthNet to schedule consultations and referrals, making it unnecessary for ill patients to travel long distances with no guarantee of seeing a physician.
• Medicial Alerts Health care workers in Zaire's Vanga Hospital use HealthNet to send regular dispatches to report on progress in treating Trypanosomiasis to health organizations in the North.
• Access to Medical Libraries In response to a cholera epidemic in Zambia, the medical librarian at the University obtained literature from her "partner library" at the University of Florida, then disseminated the information to all HealthNet users in the region.
• Research Malaria researchers at a remote site in northern Ghana used HealthNet to communicate daily with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Tropical Disease Research Center in Geneva.

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